Characters / Be Careful What You Wish For

Characters from the Goosebumps novel Be Careful What You Wish For.

Samantha Byrd

In the TV episode

Portrayed By: Melody Johnson (TV)

"If I had three wishes, I told myself, I know what they would be: Destroy Judith! Destroy Judith! Destroy Judith! Little Did I Know that I would soon get my wish. All three of them."

The protagonist of Be Careful What You Wish For. Samantha is a hopelessly clumsy, socially awkward girl who is constantly bullied by her classmates. After an especially bad day at school, she meets Clarissa, a witch who offers her three wishes in exchange for Samantha helping her find her way.

• Adaptation Dye-Job: Has blonde hair in the book, but her TV actress is a brunette.
• All of the Other Reindeer: She's a social outcast in addition to being clumsy. The closest she has to a friend is Cory, who isn't above taking advantage of her and doesn't stick up for her that much.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Well, it is the title of the book. All of her wishes go horribly wrong, either due to poor wording or Clarissa's incompetent magic.
• Butt-Monkey: She's mercilessly bullied both on and off the court, is constantly embarrassing herself due to her clumsiness, and is pressured to play basketball when it's clear she's no good at it. Her home life is pretty depressing too: her older brother makes fun of her and her parents seem distant and don't relate to her that well.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Her mind tends to be a bit out there, particularly when she imagines Judith during her first wish.
• Didn't Think This Through: Most of her wishes invoke this, which come back to bite her.
• Dull Surprise: At the end, when she’s wondering what Judith is saying, she just eats a worm, and flies off.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the TV episode, when she is freed from all of the wishing with both the gypsy and Judith out of her way. And in the book, with her happy as a bird after all this struggle, whether this trope is in play is debatable.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: She is the Foolish to her brother Ron’s Responsible. She tends to be insecure and insensitive, while he tends to be more sane and practical.
• Girlish Pigtails: Her hairstyle in the TV episode is depicted as such.
• Gone Horribly Right: Her third wish. She wishes for Judith to think of her as great, which comes true to the point that she’s even MORE humiliated at school from it.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: She doesn’t understand at all why Judith keeps picking on her, being confused about it all.
• Heroic BSoD: After her second wish erases everyone from existence. She starts to panic about how she's going to take care of herself, and nearly breaks down crying before she manages to find Clarissa.
• Huge Schoolgirl: She is the tallest person in her class by far. She even states that she’s taller than her own mother, at age 12!
• Incompatible Orientation: She is at first amused by Judith practically worshipping her during her third wish, but when she realizes just HOW invested she is in her, she is not comfortable at all.
• I Just Want to Be Free: Her life is pretty depressing, to the point where she fantasizes early on about jumping on her bike and riding until she leaves everything behind. When she becomes a bird at the end, she's happy, because she's now free from all her problems.
• Jerkass Ball: She can’t help feeling amused at how her first wish went out with Judith and the rest of her teammates. But it drops when she realizes just how much her wish impacted them.
• The Dog Bites Back: While Samantha raging at Judith over spilled tapioca pudding on her new sneakers at one point was a bit disproportionate to say the least, Judith had been picking on Sam so much that the latter is totally justified in attacking Judith during that moment.
• Kiddy Coveralls: In the tv show, Samantha is always seen dressed in overalls when out of her gym uniform. After her second wish, Judith matches Samatha's overalls and Girlish Pigtails
• The Klutz: Because of her tallness. She was pressured to join the basketball team despite being horrible at it due to her clumsiness. This is one of the things Judith picks on her for.
• Loose Lips: She ends up blurting out that she wants more wishes to a complete stranger, who is understandably confused at her, leaving her humiliated.
• Meaningful Name: When she turns into an actual bird.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When Judith and Anna get severely ill as a result of her first wish, she's horrified and even worries that they'll die and she'll become a murderer.
• Nice Girl: She has moments of temper, but is one of the nicer protagonists, even showing concern for her bullies when her first wish causes them to become ill.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: All of her wishes, particularly the second one.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When she helps Clarissa find her way to the location she was seeking, she offers Samantha three wishes that all backfire horribly and make Sam's life even more miserable than it was before.
• Not So Above It All: While she was feeling a little guilty during her first wish in the basketball game, she can’t help feeling a little amused at seeing Judith and Anna playing so terribly and making her look good in comparison.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Briefly, when her second wish results in all other life being erased from existence.
• Rage Breaking Point: When she visits Judith out of guilt for making her sick, she starts claiming that she’s a witch and blaming her. Samantha tries to reason with her, but when Judith reveals to her that she has been spreading this story of her being a witch to other classmates, making her seem like a freak, Samantha loses it and shrieks that she wouldn’t have done it if she wasn’t so horrible to her.
• Revenge Before Reason: Arguably what really screws her over. Each one of her wishes is motivated by a desire to pay back Judith, which ends up hurting literally everyone else. By the end, she still wants to hurt Judith and wishes her to have met Clarissa instead of herself.
• Skewed Priorities: When trying to cope with being the only person in the world, she wonders if it's still a crime to steal food from the store in order to survive.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: She actually makes a basket after her first wish, even though she's no better at playing than she was before.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: After her second wish has been redone, she is extremely happy that the people in her life are back and Judith no longer sees her as an enemy. It doesn’t last long, though...
• Trauma Conga Line: Anything that can go wrong for her, will. Her life was horrible even before she met Clarissa.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Samantha really wants to hurt Judith. Thanks to Clarissa, she gets just that, but it isn't satisfying in the slightest and only makes her own ordeal worse. One could say Clarissa was trying to teach her this, given Sam's unhealthy need to be better than Judith. It doesn't work.
• Walking Disaster Area: Her clumsiness is always causing problems for her, and Judith never misses a chance to make it even worse.
• With Friends Like These...: Her best friend, Cory, is supposed to be her best friend, but he barely sticks up to her in front of Judith, and he asks for her bag of chips at one point, and he didn’t share a single one with her.

Judith Bellwood

Portrayed By: Susan Cooke (TV)

"Why don't you fly away, Byrd?"

Samantha Byrd's main tormentor.

• Adaptation Dye-Job: Is red-haired in the book, blonde in the episode.
• Adaptational Karma: In the TV show, she wishes that wherever she'll go people will stop and admire her when Samantha wishes that Judith met Clarissa instead. She gets turned into a statue that people stop and admire.
• Alpha Bitch: She's the best player on the basketball team, and never wastes an opportunity to make fun of Samantha's clumsiness.
• Always Someone Better: She's way better at basketball than Samantha, and constantly rubs it in. It's worth noting that Samantha doesn't actually care about basketball that much, only playing because her parents and coach pressured her.
• Ambiguously Gay: When Samantha wishes that she wishes Judith would be think she was the greatest person in the world, Judith acts completely different. She cuts and ties her her hair to be just like Samantha’s, she wants to spend every waking minute with her including breaking into her house, and constantly gives her compliments. Whether these feelings towards her are platonic or romantic is unknown. And if she actually was attracted to her without the wish is another debate.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Samantha's third wish does this to her, causing her to become completely obsessed with her. It gets to the point where Samantha actually prefers the old Judith.
• The Bully: She spends every moment making Samantha's life miserable, both on and off the court.
• Catch Phrase Insult: "Why don't you fly away, Byrd?"
• Dub Name Change: The French version of the book changes her last name to Woodstock.
• Evil Redhead: While not evil, she is basically the secondary antagonist of the book and a malicious bully.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Subverted. Samantha's friend Cory claims that Judith is jealous of her, but Samantha finds this absurd because she doesn't see herself as having anything to be jealous of. She concludes that Cory's just doing a bad job of cheering her up.
• Hate Sink: What makes her even more detestable is that She even gets rewarded for her bullying at the end of the book.
• The Heavy: She's the one really responsible for the conflict, since Samantha wouldn't have been so keen to make wishes if it hadn't been for her bullying.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Clarissa is mostly just an incompetent spell caster, while Judith is basically everything wrong with Sam's life and the reason she makes most of her wishes.
• Humiliation Conga: Judith has an interesting few days, thanks to Samantha's wishes. The first wish makes her screw up at basketball, then become deathly ill. The second wish erases her from existence (along with everyone else in the world). The third wish brainwashes her into thinking Samantha's her best friend. None of it ends up sticking, though.
• Insult Backfire: The last time she uses her "Fly away" Catchphrase, it's taken literally, and Samantha is delighted to do just that.
• Jerk Jock: An uncommon female example, as she is one of the school's best basketball players, and is constantly riding Samantha over how much she sucks at the game (and in general).
• Jerkass: She's determined to make Samantha's life a misery in every way possible.
• Karma Houdini: Aside from briefly getting sick, she never receives consequences for her cruel treatment of Samantha, and at the end of the book, she gets her way while Sam suffers. This is subverted in the TV show.
• Kick the Dog: Everything she does, but ruining Samantha's new shoes really stands out.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the book, her becoming sick as a result of Samantha's first wish could be seen as this.
• Lesbian Jock: She is implied to have feelings for Samantha, and she is also a star player on her basketball team.
• Loving Bully: If she really HAD romantic feelings for Samantha even before the third wish, she was probably bullying her so much due to suppressed emotional feelings. Well, this story takes place in the 90s, when homosexuality was not tolerated as much.
• Only Friend: Implied with Anna Frost. While infatuated with Samantha as part of the third wish, Anna, her former best friend, just sits in her seat in the cafeteria, looking lonely.
• Properly Paranoid: She's quick to notice that Samantha's the only member of the basketball team not to get sick, and accuses her of casting a spell on them.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: She has copper-colored hair and green eyes and is one of the book's antagonists.
• The Sociopath: She delights in making Samantha miserable with no remorse and for no apparent reason.
• Stalker with a Crush: To Samantha, thanks to her third wish. It's ambiguous whether it's platonic.
• Taken for Granite: In the TV episode, she gets turned into a statue as a result of her first wish.
• You Have to Believe Me!: When Samantha accidentally confesses what she did, Judith starts screaming that she's a witch. Given how sick she is, her mother assumes she doesn't know what she's saying.

Clarissa

In the TV episode

Portrayed By: Ellen-Ray Hennessy (TV); Melissa Brewer (Film)

A witch who was helped by Samantha Byrd one day, and as gratitude, offer to grant Samantha three wishes. Unfortunately, because Samantha didn't think them out clearly, and Clarissa's not as skilled at magic as she seems, these wishes tend to backfire badly. She is also the basis of the "Madame Doom" fortunetelling dummy in the Goosebumps Horrorland series.

• Adaptational Attractiveness: Her level of beauty varies across the multiple formats she's appeared in. In the trading card art, she appears as heavyset. In the TV show, she seems to be in her late 40s and has a feathered black dress. In the early 2000s re-release, her appearance on the new cover for Be Careful What You Wish For seems to be a cross between the trading card art and the TV show. Finally, the artwork for the Classic Goosebumps covers and the art for the movie make Clarissa appear to be in her late 20s/early 30s, but she's also much more malevolent.
• Adaptational Jerkass: In Goosebumps HorrorTown, she is a tad more mischievous, screwing over people on purpose, although it's still hard to call her a villain.
• Adaptational Villainy: Appears to be portrayed as a straightforward villain in the 2015 movie.
• Adaptational Wimp / Demoted to Extra: Sadly, she's little more than another mook for Slappy to boss around in the movie.
• Affably Evil: She does genuinely seem to want to help Sam, even offering her an extra wish. It's just that she's horribly incompetent at granting them.
• Ambiguously Human: Clarissa may seem to be just a human magic-user but her powers go beyond a simple witch's scope and break the laws of reality and time. Her grasp on right and wrong is also quite off at best.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The reason she is so insistent on granting Samantha's wishes is because Samantha helped her when Clarissa got lost, and also found a crystal that belonged to her.
• Beware the Nice Ones: She's honestly one of the nicest and most reasonable figures in the Goosebumps universe. She also has powers that will royally fuck up your life and everyone around you, whether she means to or not.
• Beware the Superman: Causing a temporary apocalypse is one of the outcomes if she's on your side.
• Dark Is Evil / Dark Is Not Evil: She zigzags these tropes. Clarissa dresses in black and while she isn't actively malevolent, her powers can make everyone on the planet disappear if someone made a careless wish.
• Exact Words: She lives for this trope.
• The Heavy: Samantha is the one making wishes, but Clarissa carries them out, and thus ends up driving the entire plot of the book.
• Jackass Genie: To Judith in the TV show, but this comes across as a cathartic moment. When Judith wishes that people from all over would come to admire her, Clarissa turns her into a beautiful statue.
• Karma Houdini: Remains at large by the end of the story, just as capable of making people's wishes backfire.
• Literal Genie: She'd be a Jackass Genie, but the thing is Clarissa is actively trying to repay Samantha's kindness and warns her both that her powers aren't as refined as she'd like to admit and that Samantha has to think out her wishes clearly before she makes them.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: She invariably screws up Samantha's wishes horribly, such as making her the best basketball player on the team by making all the other players sickly. It gets so bad Samantha eventually wishes they never met.
• Pet the Dog: To Samantha in the TV show, since she genuinely does appear to feel sympathy for her.
• Reality Warper: Quite possibly the most powerful entity in the series, pulling stuff like Turning back time, changing kids into animals, making seemingly everyone on the planet disappear...
• Unwanted Assistance: Samantha doesn't actually want her help, but Clarissa is insistent on repaying her debt, and it's easier to understand that Samantha only makes her other wishes they way she does A: Because she wants Clarissa to leave her alone, and B: She's scared and not thinking straight.